Monday, April 20, 2020

The House of Goodwill - the beginning of a new adventure!


This blog is a place to celebrate all things vintage, recycled, thrifted, flea and free.  I’m creating this place to share my favorite thrift store finds with anyone else of the same mind: those who believe that the only thing that improves antique and vintage finds is finding them at a great price!

This week my husband and I are closing on what I have named The House of Goodwill.  It’s a 3000-square-foot house on a lake that we will be using, and renting on Airbnb as well.  It looks like it could be the home of the Brady Bunch’s southern cousins:  a really cool stone house built in 1974, complete with dark molding, spiral staircase, intercom system and sunken bathtub.



Since my own house is full of secondhand furniture, Goodwill purchases, flea market items and family leftovers, why should this lake house be any different?  Not to mention that since we are borrowing money to get this thing going, the budget is hugely important.  I started wondering if I could get an entire house (4 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms) completely furnished and ready to go on a budget of $5000.  Is it even possible?

The big ticket items will certainly be hard to find: beds & mattresses, nice televisions and quality sofas are extremely hard to find cheap.  Not to mention that I’ll need bed linens and towels, etc. – things that most likely I’ll need to buy new.

The real challenge will be not just to find everything within budget, but to find everything within budget AND make it look good.  Really good!  I don’t want to create an Airbnb that looks like I threw together a bunch of free pieces of junk furniture that I found on the side of the road somewhere.  I want people to step inside this house when it’s finished and think it looks great.  I want to make my $5000 budget somehow look like I spent $15,000 or more.

So here we go.  I’m going to record everything I find or buy and keep track of my budget as I go.  I have no idea if I can do this or not, but the fun (as always) will be in the hunting!

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